Now What?

Introductory note: Hi! I was a regular contributor to Pitchfork from 2002-2009, except for a few-month fake Jay-Z "retirement" due to some now-shameful sub-righteous reactionary hissyfit I had about The Black Album's getting more love around here than the New Pornographers' Electric Version. For reasons that will soon be obvious, I've resisted the temptation to submit a grateful, sentimental reflection (though I'm totally grateful and sentimental), or a litany of staff and site-wonk in-jokes. ("When director David Fincher films his Ryan Schreiber-as-savant drama Best New Music, I hope to be a backgrounded extra, donning a 'Free Nick Sylvester' t-shirt.") By now we all know the legend of how, after the deaths of many close to him, a young Ryan, lovelorn and ill, locked himself in a remote Wisconsin cabin to develop a web magazine with the ultimate goal of promoting You Forgot It in People. Along the way he pulled up from record-store and message-board trolldom a glut of young typists who've gone on to pollinate the planet with their own books and children and music and blogs and editorial posts and "A-" reviews of Foo Fighters albums in Entertainment Weekly. I could regale you with creeps-to-kingpins lore of pools, limos, hookers, and blow, (like the time some of us pooled our money to rent a limo from which to catcall hookers who blew us off), but I elect instead to unsexily and unboldly worry about the future.

--

"I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I'm reminiscing this right now. I can't go to the bar because I've already already looked back on it in my memory, and I didn't have a good time."

--Chris Eigeman as Max, in Noah Baumbach's Kicking & Screaming, 1995

When Pitchfork Editor-in-Chief Mark Richardson contacted me about contributing to a series of features marking the site's finally being old enough to get straight-married in just under 10 American states, I was undergoing a process of trying to swear off the back-look. See, I turned 35 over the summer, my temples went silver, and well, I took the whole I'm-probably-at-or-beyond-the-halfway-point-of-my-conscious-existence thing pretty hard. As a third-generation music-obsessive who's been a freelance music critic since 1994, I also have a vested interest in not becoming yet another culture-consumer whose notional "adultness" involves no longer keeping up with new music, a gateway elision often seen to lead to that cranky fallacious confidence about the superiority of the music that just happens to align with the heights of one's young adulthood. ("How fortuitous and lottery-like, Grampaw, that you turned 22 right when music peaked.") Yes, the majority of my crucial memories are linked to songs, duh, but that pattern has also continued up until recently, with new artists specific either to their month of fame or whatever genre tributary I'd fixated on. Again: up until recently. Lately, obsessing about music hasn't been doing it for me the way that it used to, and I'm terrified, because I forgot to become an otherwise three-dimensional human being outside of that obsession. Uh-oh: are my formative years completely over, and now I'm (gulp) formed?

My genius plan to sidestep a lifestyle version of Simon Reynolds' Retromania involved avoiding the anniversarial, and subjecting myself to a rigorous nostalgia detox. Of course I didn't want to end up acting all Vulcan, but I also didn't want to fall into that mid-30s cliché of seeming to have too many past adventures and not enough future ones. In my quest to not be that guy who forever equates Eddie Rabbit with fighting my sister in the backseat of Mom's red Bonneville after my parents' divorce, or the Archers of Loaf with a vacation catastrophe during college, or even blowing speakers with Blank Dogs due to the recent death of an ex's mother, I must have scooped out some crucial psyche-wiring, a breach which has left me feeling newly more numb about music at present, even though so much wild and interesting music is being made. Have I used up all my pleasure receptors? Are the highs somehow internally moderated at my age, like a speed governor inhibiting a U-haul truck? Was my emotionally-needy approach to music doomed to fail? Surely there's a more rational explanation?

Lately, obsessing about music hasn't been doing it for me the way that it used to, and I'm terrified, because I forgot to become an otherwise three-dimensional human being outside of that obsession.

Perhaps witnessing rapid evolution can exhaust a person into thinking they're a dinosaur before their time. I (and Pitchfork) came to maturity during the transition from music's era of expensive tangibility into the current one of cheap/free ethereality. (Not that we fiends didn't shoplift or otherwise finagle music into our clutches and brains way before we downloaded it.) The old (okay, lame) hope of reaping social distinction from cultivating obscure expertise is also pretty much obsolete, since all fall short of the glory of Google. I should be superhappy for fan-kids today, but I'm circumstantially resentful of the cloud's ease, possibly only because of how embarrassing it is to have suffered in the other, outmoded epoch when tapes, CDs, and records had to be lugged around via unwieldy milkcrates, or worse, those long unsteady Rubbermaid coffins. (In the early aughts, Ryan used to mail us batches of promotional discs! Sepia crazy!) I feel almost like someone diagnosed with a protracted disease on the eve of a vaccine's mass availability (except, of course, that the disease had its pleasures). But when older folks complain regarding music's overwhelming plenitude and disposability now, they bring up the question: did their mini-generation care so much about their music because they paid for it, and because it took up physical space? Do I really half-listen to releases now because they're in the cloud for free, whereas, back in the day, I would play, say, Run Westy Run's Twin/Tone debut over and over, fully concentrating on it in an attempt to justify my purchase of it and its spot between Run-D.M.C. and the Rutles in my sacred shelf realty?

To give you an idea of what an awkward spot this dilemma's put me in: of the eight rooms in my current residence, only the kitchen, bathroom, and laundry/pantry aren't filled with evidence/detritus of my music-assed life (huge stockpiles of recordings in various formats, gadgets on which to play them, instruments and recording equipment, books, posters/art, etc). Plus the altar of periodicals and anthologies in which my fitful and belabored typing were graciously published. So, to suddenly no longer feel self-defined as "music guy" after all these years is, well, humiliating, especially right there in front of my no-spouse and no-children and the ghosts of cats named after obnoxious minutiae such as, oh, Jandek's label (sweet Corwood, thou art missed). Exacerbating the problem is that I don't foresee something else taking music's place: not religion, politics, poetry, cinema, romance, cooking, cosplay, intoxication, gardening, woodworking, exercise bulimia, etc. And when a fellow obsessive tells me that losing access to being turbo-excited about music as a central prerogative is a "fake problem," I have to ask them if they're backhandedly admitting that their continued singular esteem for music, then, is a fake priority.

A number of other factors contributed, I think, to my current malaise:

1) I made keeping up with music into a joyless task.

Learning, and overthinking, about music has always been fun to me. My earliest memory of criticism is probably when I noticed how redundant so many of the Baptist hymns of my childhood were. "This song is really about how we're gathered here singing, lifting our voices together in praise? Um, we know that. That's neither informative nor stimulating." But a quarter-century later, such an emerging abundance of music is simple to access at a pace that dwarfs my ability to even coherently kneejerk respond to it. My controlling nature grew to hate the chaos of leak-culture, so I swore to try to organize my listenership via the quaint principle of street dates; however, Bandcamp and SoundCloud and remixes and mashups and YouTube live covers and mixtapes would not relent. I ended up declaring Mondays my official weekday for acquiring and listening to a particular week's "everything," assisted by ridiculous charts and lists and calendars. It was horrible, but hey-hey, sweet victory, my listenership sure did remain contemporary (which is like going deep-sea fishing and barfing the whole time, only to brag about keeping one's pole in the water).

2) I let a supposed/imagined "state of music writing" break my heart.

Yeah, I don't really want to agonize about this pseudo-scourge, but the democratization of hype has obviously resulted in some lazy first-iness for first-iness' sake, and some sloppily press-release-parroting recommendation engines. On the earnest sites, the terms "amazing" and "brilliant" get much abused, often after an unearned "fucking". While one peruses the snarky sites, one wonders how the authors can wake each day to report on a phenomenon that they seem to deride so much that they feel bound to mock it pathologically. (That's the sound of, as Tony Hoagland wrote about a-holes at a party bashing D.H. Lawrence, "maggots condescending to a corpse.") And yet I'm subject as well to flinch when an "absolutely" "heartfelt" "sprawling" product about to drop has its "cover art revealed!"

My genius plan to sidestep a lifestyle version of Simon Reynolds' Retromania involved avoiding the anniversarial, and subjecting myself to a rigorous nostalgia detox.

3) I overstraddled the snobbery-loneliness continuum.

Ever since middle school, I've taken peers to task when they claimed to "listen to everything," because they almost always meant Top 40 with maybe one deep-cut album they heard about from a parent, babysitter, or older sibling. I was the dick who worked at the niche indie store who'd object, "Really, 'everything'? Then what are your favorite zydeco, bluegrass, and Transylvanian Jewish folk albums?" Now imagine that persnicket growing up, and getting empowered by music-nerd culture's online blossoming. Then stoop to imagine him at 35, holding a pillow over his face as he regrets not being able to consummate with, much less commit to, a Maggie-Gyllenhaal-esque sweetheart because she had that one Jim Morrison poster up in her room, despite Ian Curtis and Glenn Danzig's vouches for Morrison, etc.

I was never too much of an unbearable goober about an act's unoriginality or detectable influences, as long as their work seemed strong. Or so I thought, until fad-tentacles re-latched onto tones that I lived through the first time. Tearist are perfectly free to sound like Suicide fronted by an evil Molly Shannon, and Mirrors can sound like a confection of 80s synth softies, and I won't mind, because I never got to experience Suicide or 80s synth softies. But woe unto these new bands appropriating lo-fi and 90s slack-spirals for which I already had the luxury of buying tickets.

5) Holy hell, y'all, I got cyber-stalked!

A crazy, much older lady consulted my Pitchfork pieces, my blogspot ventricle, local radio show, and my last.fm profile, and began a horrifying, two-year, one-way harassment correspondence, often interpreting my writing, postings, and listenership in a manner so delusionally personalized and disturbing that it considerably reduced my enjoyment of the freedom to write, hotlink, host, and listen.

6) The future's spooky.

Any hippie or techie can abstractly look forward to tomorrow, and yes, the unknown-ness of the future can seem expansively exhilarating, but that doesn't make its knowns any less chilling. For example, the future is that realm where my parents get more frail and forgetful, and eventually die. Even the word, aside from rhyming with "suture," reminds me of a film series featuring a pre-Parkinson's Michael J. Fox, or the new-jack Guy album (The Future) that was my make-out soundtrack with a girlfriend later killed serving in Afghanistan. Even when I fled church apocalypses and commodified my dissent, I still had the Dead Kennedys and Public Enemy telling me how nightmarish the future was going to be, on top of the Sex Pistols' espousal of futurelessness. I mean, both Saturday Night Fever (1977) and season two of "Deadwood" (2005) contain characters proclaiming "fuck the future," only to be rebuffed: "The future fucks you." Gross, look what I'm doing, trying to suss the future in terms of the past! Okay, okay, deep breath: at this exact cultural moment, I associate the word "future" with an Odd-ly annoying hip-hop collective, and Miranda July's recent attempt to reboot the Look Who's Talking series from a cat's perspective.

7) I fell innocent victim to a hypersensitivity about misuses of the word "nostalgia."

Reckon that, in my paranoid haste to not age, I succumbed to a strange contemporary bias against acknowledging one's past? I don't know if this is true in your corporeal and virtual circles, but in my admittedly compromised existence, there's always a gargoyle handy to harp "nostalgia!" whenever someone recounts a memory, like an insecure partner claiming to have been cheated on whenever their mate mentions another human being, or a 2004 Republican yelling "flip flopper" whenever someone carefully reconsiders an ideological or strategic stance. Obviously the denotative and cognitive gulf between "nostalgia" and "memory" is vast; to whom should this ever require explanation? Maybe the vampiric way that I receive a sort of energy from youth culture, or the (in bourgeois terms) "disreputable" age difference between myself and most of my homesnakes contribute to why I feel somehow implicated by rhetorically honoring how long I've haunted the earth.

No other act claimed the past, present, and future so authoritatively, archly, and elegantly. And the Hold Steady didn't replace Franz Nicolay with a laptoppy, synthy wizard to orchestrate their own time-transcending "Bay of Pigs".

Ah well. Maybe this phantom-zone feeling's temporary. Maybe part of aging gracefully is not being so square about needing to make sense to oneself. I'm okay with Jamie Stewart bashing groups that sound Beach Boys-influenced on his website, and I'm okay with some recent Beach Boys-influenced tracks. I can consider the upcoming 2011 Athens, Georgia Popfest to be dorkily back-looking for booking Throwing Muses and the Dead Milkmen as headliners, but may I also have permission to be stoked to behold my high-school dream concert? S'not like it deletes Austra or Girl Unit from my iPod. And isn't insisting on time-based taste-standards as bad or worse as the old pre-syncretist days of the 90s when a clerk could tell me that I couldn't purchase Kilo and R.E.M. at the same time? I mean, hooray, now the soundtrack of an extended Applebees/McDonalds/banality commercial such as the movie Hall Pass can include such critics' darlings as Generationals, Deer Tick, Empire of the Sun, Black Mountain, and Röyksopp featuring the Knife/Fever Ray's Karin Driejer!

Among my favorite and freakishly soothing memories is riding these really tall spinning bucket swings at Myrtle Beach's Pavilion amusement park with my then-wife in either 1999 or 2000. The swings rose so high after you fastened your little safety bar, and flung you at such severe angles, that some ticketholders were scared of them. (I know a few hearty souls who puked after riding them.) This one time, everyone's hair was blowing, and our legs were dangling, and you know, we were chained to the giant whirling machine, but not worrying, just enjoying the manufactured breeze. But what made the experience awesome was the soundtrack for this particular ride: "Come Undone", that seductive single from one of Duran Duran's comebacks, which at the time seemed perfectly produced to be played by cheesy ride deejays, as it shared the air with the scent of popcorn, cotton candy, tanning oil, and Drakkar Noir. The park is closed now, and the marriage ended soon after. "Come Undone" is widely available online after a click.

This is not nostalgia. I'm not embellishing. I wouldn't necessarily want to be overcharged to ride those swings again. The ex-wife and I are long-distance bosom pals. That song's atmosphere always trumped its dippy lyrics. I wholly anticipate future moments as deserving of the space which that one occupies in the cassette/record/CD bin, hard-drive, or, hell, cloud of my memory.